Nirvana

Associated Press

With its 1991 album, "Nevermind," Nirvana put alternative rock, the noisy, icon-smashing spawn of punk rock, into the commercial mainstream. The album sold nearly 10 million copies worldwide, knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the popular music charts and established an anthem for a generation with the song "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

Dressed in thrift-shop plaid shirts and torn jeans, a fashion soon copied by designers around the world, Kurt Cobain and the members of his band raged against the material and synthetic trappings of pop music. They concocted a sound that was close to both the nihilistic fury of punk rock and the tunefulness of the Beatles. Nirvana's popularity signaled the acceptability not only of grunge but also of many other bands once considered far too raw and scruffy for the mainstream.

"Nirvana will be remembered for revolutionizing the state of rock 'n' roll in the 1990's, pulling it away from a processed, rather synthetic sound and returning it to something more sincere," said Michael Azerrad, the author of "Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana," published last year by Doubleday. — From Mr. Cobain's obituary by Timothy Egan, April 9, 1994

Nirvana's vertiginous ascent to stardom has to be the year's most surprising success story. The single "Smells Like Teen Spirit" has been in heavy rotation on MTV, while the album "Nevermind" has sold more than half a million copies in a couple of months. What is strange about Nirvana's popularity is that both single and album are untamed punk rock -- slightly more glossily produced and tuneful than the hard-core norm but bearing no discernible signs of compromise.

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